The history of emotions has become an important research field, and affect theory continues to push the boundaries of critical inquiry. However, the relationships between the representation and interpretation of emotions, their respective aesthetic registers and symbolic modes, and their social practices and ideological effects remain elusive. The implications for our understanding of the utopian function of art and the history of counterpublics are nowhere greater than in the study of political emotions and what I call the proletarian dream. This presentation addresses some of the methodological challenges in reconstructing the emotional communities associated with nineteenth and twentieth-century working-class culture and the socialist movement and uses the photomontages of John Heartfield as a case study on rage as a political emotion and artistic method.